


Princess Beatrice and the Curse of Destiny

by drayton



Category: Belinda And Bellamant; Or The Bells of Carrillon Land- Edith Nesbit
Genre: Canon Continuation, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-10
Updated: 2015-08-10
Packaged: 2018-04-14 22:48:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,656
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4583079
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/drayton/pseuds/drayton
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Queen Belinda and King Bellamant lived happily ever after.  Almost.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Princess Beatrice and the Curse of Destiny

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sumi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sumi/gifts).



In the distant past, when countries had different names than they do now and new things were still being wrought out of the mists of the world, the Story-teller was born. The Story-teller was the first and perhaps greatest of his kind and crafted all of the stories that ever have been or ever shall be, or so he thought, because he had the gift of words, but not of modesty.

Words were the Story-teller's tools, delicate as the finest needles and strong as the heaviest iron, and he wrought them well. To hear his stories was to breathe in the life of the world, to dance on the mountain-tops, to soar on the breeze. His stories had the power to break hearts and mend them again, to teach, to inspire, and to inflame.

All of this should have worked for good, save for one thing: for all of his imagination, the first Story-teller lacked empathy. His mind had been infused with a special magic, yet his heart remained untouched, and he grew tired of using his great gift for the benefit of others. Which is why, one day, he decided to leave the world behind and retire to a distant country he'd written into existence.

Summoning the full extent of his powers, the Story-teller created a kingdom, thoughtfully appointed with wise councilors, complacent peasantry, and a lovely bride, and made himself ruler. Just before dashing off a brief story of forgetfulness to foil pursuit, his penultimate act as Story-teller was to write down all his old stories and end each one with the words, “And they lived happily never after.”

Well, nearly. That is what the Story-teller _meant_ to write, because he'd become annoyed by all of the people following him around and begging for more stories. What he actually wrote were the words, “And they lived happily ever after.” You see, the Story-teller was careless, and a notoriously bad speller.

Which brings us to Belinda and Bellamant and their lovely baby princess. You may have heard that they lived happily ever after, because that's what the stories say, but hovering behind those words is the ghost of the Story-teller's intent. Sometimes, the happy ending comes undone.

And so it was with Queen Belinda, King Bellamant, and tiny Princess Beatrice. The King and Queen loved their daughter with all of their hearts, as parents do, and strove to protect her from all manner of evil. Their plans for Beatrice's christening began months before her birth. Menus, seating plans, party favors, and most importantly, the guest list were endlessly discussed. No one was to be left out. A christening curse must be avoided at all costs.

At first, everything seemed to go well. The child was born, invitations were sent, the castle was decorated, a feast was prepared, and special musicians and extra servants were engaged. On the day of the christening, the guests arrived in good cheer, and the christening itself went off without a hitch. There was a feast afterwards, with music and dancing, and the guests ate and drank and danced, and then ate and drank some more.

When the guests began leaving, King Bellamant heaved a discreet sigh of relief. He'd enjoyed the feast and the guests very much, but had spent the day worrying that someone would take offense and curse Beatrice, who was very precious to him.

One of the last guests to take their leave was the hag Malevola, who had cursed King Bellamant at _his_ christening. No one had actually wanted to invite her, but they'd been afraid not to.

“Lovely feast,” Malevola said, burping delicately into an embroidered napkin. “So good of you to invite me. Really, it's a shame, but I'm afraid I'll have to curse the baby now.”

“But why?” Queen Belinda cried. “How can we possibly have offended you?”

“Oh, child, it's not a matter of offense,” Malevola said. “I'm a hag. It's my job. It's true that when someone's rude, I really put my back into it, but cursing people is what I was born to do. Everyone has their place in the story. This is mine.”

“Why don't we sit down and discuss this,” the King suggested. “Have you tried the lemon custard tarts?”

The King could see Malevola's reluctance to curse the Princess, and hoped that more good food would make her even more reluctant—or full enough to fall asleep. Didn't she have to place the curse on Beatrice's actual christening day?

Malevola obligingly sat, and began reviewing possible curses. “Let's see, the really bad ones are right out—she is a lovely little thing, and was so well-behaved at the christening—so no early death or grisly dismemberments. And it would be a pity to make her ugly.”

“Try the roasted swan,” Queen Belinda said, filling a plate. “It's particularly good with the brandy sauce.”

“And perhaps more wine?” the King suggested, offering Malevola a goblet.

“Why, thank you.” She drank deeply before saying, “I think making her deaf or blind would also be too much.”

“Oh, absolutely,” the Queen said. “You're very considerate. Cream puff?”

“Don't mind if I do,” Malevola said, taking a cream puff from a silver platter carefully left within the hag's reach. “Then there are ones associated with ability... I say, these _are_ delicious... I could make her a bad singer or a clumsy dancer...”

“That doesn't sound so bad,” the King said cautiously, “Keep going.”

“I really can't decide,” Malevola said. Her eyelids were growing heavy.

“Perhaps a bit of rest will help you clear your head,” the Queen said gently. “There's a very comfortable divan, just over there.”

“Yes... rest,” Malevola said, grabbing a few more dainties as the King and Queen helped her stumble to the divan. “Perhaps I could... make her a bad speller? Oh, I'm sure that should remind me of _something_...”

“I'm certain it will come to you later,” the King said, very softly indeed, as Malevola had fallen into a slumber.

The King and Queen tiptoed away from Malevola's side, and told the castle servants that no one was to disturb Malevola's rest. “Clear the tables in the morning,” the Queen ordered, as the King hastened forward to say goodbye to an approaching guest.

As the hours passed, a single servant moved quietly from candelabra to candelabra, carefully extinguishing most of the light in the ballroom. The King and Queen now sat side by side near the divan, occasionally glancing at each other.

“If she sleeps until midnight?” the Queen whispered.

“I think so,” the King whispered back.

They watched anxiously as Malevola began to mutter and toss on the divan. At ten minutes to midnight, she woke with a start.

“What a dream I've had,” she said, and then remembered, “The curse! I know what to do!”

“It's rather late,” the Queen said hastily. “In fact, it may be after midnight.”

“Fetch the child,” Malevola ordered. “If I'm right, she has a Destiny.”

The King shuddered, because having a destiny can be even more perilous than having a curse, but something about Malevola's wild-eyed expression warned him that she was not to be trifled with. A servant was dispatched immediately, and a nurse came hurrying back with Beatrice just as the bells began striking midnight.

Malevola looked closely into the child's face before saying, “Yes. You will be the one. I lay a curse upon you, little princess. Until you meet your destiny, you will skip everywhere you go when the moon is full.”

“And what is her destiny?” the Queen asked fearfully.

“To free us all,” Malevola answered.

 

For a cursed child, Princess Beatrice had a surprisingly uneventful upbringing, perhaps because no one had informed her she had a destiny. She laughed and sang and explored the castle. She stole away from her nurse to play in the mud and climb trees. She skipped everywhere during the full moon, but was such an active child that scarcely anyone noticed. She loved stories and asked questions about everything, all the time.

“But _why_ does the story go that way?” she often said. “Wouldn't it make more sense if _this_ happened instead?”

“But a story is not the real world, Princess,” her tutor would patiently explain. “It goes as it was written. It can bend no other way.”

Princess Beatrice had a growing sense that her tutor was utterly wrong about this, but she kept her doubts to herself because she was a very polite child.

 

As she grew, some of her attendants tried to make her into the sort of princess most of the young men in the Royal Match Catalogue Illustrated advertise for: pretty, demure, and mildly useless. Beatrice vigorously resisted all of their attempts to make her “a proper lady”.

In despair, Queen Belinda told her husband, “It's past time for Beatrice to begin acting like a princess, if she is to make a good match.”

“She has a destiny,” the King said. “Let her be who she is.”

And so Beatrice learned to fence and hunt with her younger brothers. On her sixteenth birthday, Beatrice's parents told her the full story of her christening. “So, you see, you have a destiny,” the King concluded, “but we don't quite know what it is, or when or how you'll find it.”

To be perfectly honest, the King and Queen had often worried that Beatrice's destiny would find her, but no magical beasts had sprung up to terrorize the countryside, no mysterious strangers had arrived at the castle, and Beatrice's skipping had yet to lead her to a tragic fate.

 

Seasons passed, and nothing extraordinary happened at all. Beatrice grew more lovely, and more impatient. She began to wonder whether her destiny was to be completely unremarkable. Her parents had told her about talking bats and enchanters and bells with voices, but Beatrice had experienced none of those things. She began wandering the woods near the castle alone, hoping to encounter something magical or at least mildly abnormal, but Carrillon-land seemed to be a determinedly well-behaved domain.

On her eighteenth birthday, her parents hosted an all-day feast and invited everyone in the kingdom to attend. _Surely, my destiny will begin today_ , Beatrice thought, but the only thing that happened was a really good birthday party, featuring a cake so large that it had to be wheeled into the courtyard on a cart pulled by a small pony.

After the feast, the King said, “It's time to begin considering possible marriages for you. Perhaps your destiny lies there.”

“I don't think so,” Beatrice said, “and there's the whole skipping thing. There can't be too many princes looking for brides who skip constantly when the moon is full.”

Queen Belinda smiled. “You'd be amazed what sort of unusual treasures you can find.”

 

After many false starts and awkward meetings, a match was made for Beatrice, to Roland, the young prince of Shadow-wood. Roland thought Beatrice's skipping was charming and Beatrice was delighted to meet someone who enjoyed stories as thoroughly as she did. The only impediment to their happiness was that Princess Beatrice was destined to rule Carrillon-land someday, while Prince Roland was expected to be the king of Shadow-wood. After much arguing back and forth between their parents, it was agreed that Beatrice would marry Roland and live with him in Shadow-wood until one of Roland's baby brothers was old enough to rule.

They were married in Carrillon-land the following spring, and Prince Roland spent the long journey back to Shadow-wood regaling her with tales of her new home.

“You'll love the Royal Library,” he said. “Father goes on and on about how inexhaustible our gold mines seem to be, but in my opinion, the library is our real treasure.”

“I look forward to seeing it,” Beatrice said.

The next morning, she found a long white feather underneath her pillow. “Did you leave this here?” she asked her husband, but he was clearly as puzzled as she was. She put it aside with a shrug, and it wasn't until she she found a second feather the next day that she remembered the first one.

Every morning after that, she found another feather underneath her pillow. At first, Beatrice thought Roland was playing a practical joke on her, but as time went on, she realized that perhaps her destiny was approaching at last. But what could she accomplish with feathers?

 

After arriving at Castle Shadow-wood, Princess Beatrice began wondering what she could do, period. The King and Queen of Shadow-wood seemed to have matters well in hand. Roland spent a goodly part of each day with his father, helping him rule, but the Queen had no need of Beatrice, who found herself spending more and more time alone in the Royal Library.

Roland had not exaggerated the worth of the Royal Library. Beatrice forgot to be lonely when she was exploring the library's dim corners, searching for new books. There seemed to be books of every size and shape, about every topic imaginable under the sun, but nothing was organized.

“I know,” Roland said, when she mentioned it to him. “We just kept adding on, and I'm afraid it's become quite a muddle in there.”

“Would you like me to sort it out?” Beatrice asked, eager to be of use at last.

“Would you? That would be wonderful. I'm sure there must be things buried in there that no one's unearthed in hundreds of years.”

A shadow seemed to cross the room when Roland said that, but neither he nor Beatrice noticed.

 

Spring blossomed into summer, and then ripened into golden fall, as Beatrice slowly worked her way through the library, making an exhaustive list of everything she'd seen and where it was. The feathers were still arriving, one each morning, and Beatrice began sharpening them to use as quills.

Three days after the midwinter's feast, Beatrice reached an odd little corner of the library where the bindings on the books were cracked in places. “Someone really should have taken better care of these,” Beatrice said to herself. She donned a pair of white gloves, carefully pried open the metal hasps on a especially large tome, and met her destiny.

Although the book she'd just opened _was_ extraordinary, the title page did not in fact read, “How do you do, Princess Beatrice? I am your destiny.” Instead, it read, “All the stories of the world, by Me.”

With a furrowed brow, she studied the table of contents, and saw that nearly every story she'd ever heard or read _was_ written down in the book. The pages were so fragile that Beatrice found herself afraid to turn them. _This should not be lost_ , Beatrice thought to herself.

When she woke the next morning, there was a small stack of fresh parchment lying underneath the daily feather.

 

As snow lay deeply on the castle grounds, Beatrice spent weeks painstakingly copying each story in The Book onto the parchment that now appeared under her pillow each morning.

“It's like the castle wants you to copy that book,” Roland said one evening, while idly thumbing through what Beatrice had done that day. “I say, I didn't remember _this_ happening in that story.”

“What?” Beatrice said.

“The cow jumped over the moon? Isn't that a bit improbable? I've always heard that it jumped over a fence and went capering away. Not that the idea of a capering cow is much more likely, come to think of it.”

“I didn't write anything about a moon,” Beatrice said, but clearly she had. “I'll do it again,” she said, but when she'd finished recopying the page, the cow had once again vaulted over the moon. “I don't understand,” she said in frustration.

“I do,” Roland said. “You're not supposed to copy the book. You're supposed to re-write it.”

“But I didn't try to re-write it,” Beatrice said. “The story... just happened.”

“Don't fuss over it,” Roland said. “I like your version better.”

 

Beatrice continued with her copying, trying her best to do no more than correct the many misspellings she encountered, but almost every time she reviewed her work, she found errors, or rather, differences. Some of them were obvious, like the cow. Others were more subtle shifts, like a story about an evil witch who cursed children. In the original version, the witch cursed nearly every baby she met. In Beatrice's version, the witch often chose not to.

As she neared the end of The Book, Beatrice encountered an unfamiliar story, titled “The Story of Shadow-wood.” She'd expected it to be a brief history of the kingdom, perhaps suitable for children, but instead found a fairy tale about a man who'd created a country for himself, simply by writing a story about it. How decidedly odd.

Troubled, she moved on to read the next story without first copying “The Story of Shadow-wood.” It was called “The Time of Forgetting,” and was about a man who made everyone forget the person he'd once been, so he could retire. Beatrice felt a chill go through her that had nothing to do with the winter winds howling outside the library's windows.

 _It isn't real_ , she thought. _Shadow-wood isn't real. It was made up and yet—it's here. Is Roland fictional, too?_

 

“You look pale tonight,” Roland told her a few hours later. “Are you feeling unwell?”

“Tell me what you know about Shadow-wood,” Beatrice said. “About how it started. Tell me about the first king.”

“Clarence the Mad? There's a portrait of him, tucked away in one of the attics. Came across it when I was exploring, as a boy. It terrified me. Perhaps that's why someone put it in storage in the first place. It can be hard enough rubbing along with your living relatives, without having to put up with the dead ones, too.”

“How was he mad? What did he do?”

“Do? Nothing that out of the ordinary, as I recall. He didn't go around knighting the sheep, if that's what you mean. He was just a bit odd. Supposedly made a deathbed confession to his son that the whole kingdom of Shadow-wood is imaginary. Doesn't make sense, does it?”

“Perhaps it does,” Beatrice said, and told him about The Book.

Roland goggled. “You mean, there really was an Author? The Great Story-teller? And _I'm_ descended from him?”

“Yes,” Beatrice said. “And that's the problem. The hag who cursed me told my parents that my destiny is to save everyone. All my life, the stories have felt wrong, as if they wanted to flow another way, but they couldn't.”

“You think they were trapped in the Book. That the Great Story-teller was impatient, and got some of the details wrong. And you've been freeing them.”

“Yes. What happens when I copy the story of Shadow-wood's creation? What if I change something? What if you don't exist anymore?”

“What happens if you don't copy the story, and The Book disintegrates?”

 

For the next several nights, Beatrice tossed and turned in her comfortable bed. She loved her husband, and was afraid of losing him. How could she decide what to do?

The parchment and feather kept appearing underneath her pillow each morning. One day, she threw them into the fire, to distance herself from the temptation of writing, but when she went to bed that evening, they were underneath her pillow again, unblemished but smelling faintly of smoke. _It's like the castle wants you to copy the book_ , Roland had said. Apparently, it did, and her task was unfinished.

The next morning, she copied out the story of Shadow-wood's creation in a trembling hand, pausing every few words to check her work against the fading script of The Book. In Beatrice's version, the Great Author was described in far less glowing terms, but the kingdom of Shadow-wood still came into being, much as it had in the original story.

The most notable difference was that the story now had a brief appendix, which read, “After creating Shadow-wood, King Clarence wrote one more story, to free himself from the burden of his gift. His final tale removed certain knowledge of the Great Author from the minds of men and transferred the bulk of his power into the very stones of Castle Shadow-wood. Although none of his children inherited King Clarence's talent, a few of his distant descendants did, and the Castle waits in readiness to welcome and nurture any Story-tellers who pass within its walls, whatever their origin.” Surprised by that revelation, Beatrice quickly turned to the last story in The Book, but "The Time of Forgetting" had no mention of Castle Shadow-wood.

“Beatrice, are you coming down to luncheon?” Roland said, entering the library.

Tears of relief filled Beatrice's eyes. “Roland! You're all right.”

“Of course I'm all... you did it? It's done?” he said, looking beyond her, to The Book.

“Nearly. All that's left is the one where everyone forgets the author's a Story-teller.”

“Let that one go to dust,” Roland said, drawing her close. “I wouldn't want to risk forgetting you.”

 

Twelve years later, Beatrice returned to Carrillon-land to take up her crown. She and King Roland ruled long and wisely. From time to time, feathers and parchment appeared under her pillow in the morning. Whenever they did, Queen Beatrice left the day's business to her Privy Council, and wrote. Her stories were never so grandiose as to create entire kingdoms out of nothing, but the people of Carrillon-land loved them, especially the children, who often learned them by heart.

Castle Shadow-wood mourned Beatrice's absence for many years, until Beatrice and Roland's first son, Prince Harold, returned to Shadow-wood to serve as his uncle's councilor. The castle thrummed with subtle energy to welcome him home, because Harold was a Story-teller.

Even in her old age, Beatrice sometimes skipped everywhere she went—not because she was cursed, but because Roland liked to watch her doing it.

 


End file.
